Baby mammoth discovery unveiled
By Paul Rincon, BBC News
The mammoth's trunk and eyes are still intact
A baby mammoth unearthed in the permafrost of north-west Siberia could be the best preserved specimen of its type, scientists have said.
The frozen carcass is to be sent to Japan for detailed study.
The six-month-old female calf was discovered on the Yamal peninsula of Russia and is thought to have died 10,000 years ago.
The animal's trunk and eyes are still intact and some of its fur remains on the body.
Mammoths are an extinct member of the elephant family. Adults often possessed long, curved tusks and a coat of long hair.
The 130cm (4ft 3ins) tall, 50kg Siberian specimen dates to the end of the last Ice Age, when the great beasts were vanishing from the planet.
It was discovered by a reindeer herder in May this year. Yuri Khudi stumbled across the carcass near the Yuribei River, in Russia's Yamal-Nenets autonomous district.
Missing tail
Last week, an international delegation of experts convened in the town of Salekhard, near the discovery site, to carry out a preliminary examination of the animal.
"The mammoth has no defects except that its tail was bit off," said Alexei Tikhonov, vice director of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the delegation.
"In terms of its state of preservation, this is the world's most valuable discovery," he said.
Larry Agenbroad, director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs research centre in South Dakota, US, said: "To find a juvenile mammoth in any condition is extremely rare." Dr Agenbroad added that he knew of only three other examples.
Some scientists hold out hope that well preserved sperm or other cells containing viable DNA could be used to resurrect the mammoth.
Despite the inherent difficulties, Dr Agenbroad remains optimistic about the potential for cloning.
"When we got the Jarkov mammoth [found frozen in Taimyr, Siberia, in 1997], the geneticists told me: 'if you can get us good DNA, we'll have a baby mammoth for you in 22 months'," he told BBC News.
Lucrative trade
That specimen failed to yield DNA of sufficient quality, but some researchers believe it may only be a matter of time until the right find emerges from Siberia.
Bringing mammoths back from the dead could take the form of injecting sperm into the egg of a relative, such as the Asian elephant, to try to create a hybrid.
Alternatively, scientists could attempt to clone a pure mammoth by fusing the nucleus of a mammoth cell with an elephant egg cell stripped of its DNA.
But Dr Agenbroad warned that scientifically valuable Siberian mammoth specimens were being lost to a lucrative trade in ivory, skin, hair and other body parts.
The city of Yakutsk in Russia's far east forms the hub for this trade.
Local people are scouring the Siberian permafrost for remains to sell on, and, according to Dr Agenbroad, more carcasses could be falling into the hands of dealers than are finding their way to scientists.
Japan transfer
"These products are primarily for collectors and it is usually illicit," he explained.
"Originally it was for ivory, now it is everything. You can now go on almost any fossil marketing website and find mammoth hair for $50 an inch. It has grown beyond anyone's imagination."
Dr Agenbroad added: "Russia says that any mammoth remains are the property of the Russian government, but nobody really pays attention to that."
The Yamal mammoth is expected to be transferred to Jikei University in Tokyo, Japan, later this year.
A team led by Professor Naoki Suzuki will carry out an extensive study of the carcass, including CT scans of its internal organs.
Mammoths first appeared in the Pliocene Epoch, 4.8 million years ago.
What caused their widespread disappearance at the end of the last Ice Age remains unclear; but climate change, overkill by human hunters, or a combination of both could have been to blame.
One population of mammoths lived on in isolation on Russia's remote Wrangel Island until about 5,000 years ago.
Questions:
1) how long can it be now before a real live mammoth is created from DNA after this find?
2) according to Wiki – and afaik – the dwarf mammoths on Wrangel island became extinct only around 1700 to 1500 BC.
A small population of mammoths survived on St. Paul Island, Alaska, up until 6000 BC.
how long can it be now before a real live mammoth is created from DNA after this find?
R/S, yours is an interesting question. The reference to the article regarding sperm was an allusion to frozen sperm that has already been collected from mammoths although, as FM pointed out, the wording was laughable since the find is a female baby. There are already plans to hybridize mammoths by injecting sperm into modern-day elephants. Keep doing that over and over and you'll eventually get something close to a mammoth. This effort requires money and resources with a long payback (estimated gestation period for a mammoth is 22 months), and even if successful could not provide immediate results since the initial hybrids might wind up looking like elephants anyway.
More interesting though is the approach of fusing the nucleus of a mammoth cell with an elephant egg cell (ie cloning). I was the Controller of a genetic engineering company in the 1980s where we considered this project at that time, but the cloning technology and genetic material was not readily available. As you can imagine, from then until now there have been leaps and bounds in technology and I would be surprised if the first baby mammoths didn't roll off the production line in the next 5 to 10 years.
The motivation for taking on the project was this: The cloning process and product (mammoth) could be patented and the first specimens would be worth millions. There would be little additional tecnological cost to any genetic engineering firm with existing equipment in place.
Very unique find. It will be interesting to hear what the age of this young mammoth was, and what she will tell about the climate at the end of the Pleistocene. I wonder if her death was before, or after the so-called Comet explosion.
I had a geologist professor who worked up in Alaska for a number of years. He said he was working a sluice barge, using high pressure hoses to wash out a frozen bluff, when they came across a frozen mammoth in excellent preservation. They washed out the mammoth, what remained of it, and sent a perfectly preserved hind quater out to a Geological Conference that was currently beginning, where they where to sell mammoth steaks at a banquet dinner. I really don't know if I would have eaten one of these steaks or not. He said they frequently flound frozen mammoth carcases, but usually they where in very bad conditions. But this particular one was also an exceptional fine. I always thought this professor was telling a true story, but then again he could have been jiving me too. Personally, I've never been up in the North West, but I get the impression that finding mammoth remains must not be unusual.
Not unusual at all to find the bones - they wash out of river banks quite often. Rarer to find carcasses of this age. One of the more famous was "Blue Babe", a steppe bison now on display at the U of A museum in Fairbanks.
I recall a special on the Jarkov mammoth, in Siberia. A monumental recovery effort just to get the block of ice moved to a cave where they could study it but I never heard anything later.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
My father, in the 1950s, was a member of a oil exploration crew on the Texas gulf coast when they found the skeleton of a mammoth with six foot thigh bones. Not being very educated, and looking for money, they called a museum in Houston to sell it. They were told finding such a skeleton was common, and they were not interested. The crew reburied the remains and left. There is a shopping center now over the area we were told it was. Very sad.
gunny wrote:My father, in the 1950s, was a member of a oil exploration crew on the Texas gulf coast when they found the skeleton of a mammoth with six foot thigh bones. Not being very educated, and looking for money, they called a museum in Houston to sell it. They were told finding such a skeleton was common, and they were not interested. The crew reburied the remains and left. There is a shopping center now over the area we were told it was. Very sad.
I hope they had the good sense to leave an explanatory note with those remains to save future archaeologists and paleontologists from wasting decades on a vexing puzzle...
Emerging DNA technologies have already allowed some scientists to consider resurrecting the mammoth. (
THAT would be freaking COOL!!!
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Many mammoth experts scoff at the idea, calling it scientifically impossible and even morally irresponsible.
Screw those naysayers!
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Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
